New Poll. Is the oculus home better than the steam VR setup ??

molokow said:

Yeh the steam monopoly is a bit of a killer and good point about if you change headsets etc.

I don't think I'll much care if I can't play a bunch of early-VR wave shooters in two years. And anything I do still want to play will probably be $2 in a Steam sale by then.

I'm with you there a hundred percent, @Zenbane (the nostalgica I mean). We too had a little gaming shop around the corner...little sitting lounge with a couple of consoles where you could sit and play a few titles. My mates and me used to meet there every Saturdaymorning for a couple hours. (Tbh I think we spent more cash on beverages there than we did on games)
Unfortunately that store is no more - online competition and such - so running it was a huge money sink in the end (no matter how many cups of coffee we bought).

When Half Life 2 came out we simply had no other choice than to install Steam - noone of us was happy about that (had a little plague feeling at the time). We feared digitized versions of games wouldn't appease the collector in most of us.

I mean look at the boxes of that time..Ultima VI, VII, Wing Commander III & IV, Gothic - those boxes had content. It wasn't just about having the game---you wanted the little extras (cloth maps, coins and such).

I came back from a computer fair one day and I managed to get a handsigned copy of Ultima VI by Lord British...with an included cloth map which was extremly rare here in Germany. Not only did we just get a box with a papermap but getting an edition with a cloth map AND the signature of LB??? Friend of mine (huge Ultima and Richard Garriott-fan at the time) couldn't believe what I bought (for mere 10 marks mind you).

Anyways..I hate that the time of the boxed nice games is behind us and I hate even more that you have to pay an insane amount for so-called Collectors Editions nowadays which imo can't hold a light to the normal editions of that time but since everything is only digital nowadays...where is the point in having a box?

So....yeah.....I guess Steam has become a necessary evil. Cheap games, holiday sales, an online library....it's what the people want apparently.

Me....I'd rather much have the old packed boxes of the past back.

Yeh the problem with steam is you get a lot of junk titles that people tend to think is cool.
Just a lot of rubbish.
There is still some dodgy game on the OC store but you cant refund at all.

JettStiles said:

When Half Life 2 came out we simply had no other choice than to install Steam

i had to use my friends internet to get it working. unimpressed was not the word!

When it comes to buying and playing VR games, Oculus Home is great. One feature I wish it had was game sharing. My wife and I both have a Rift and we are used to being able to share e-purchases. This is something that Amazon and Steam allow. It is not yet possible with Oculus Home; maybe in the future.

Why cant we just call someone like a steam phone call.
I love that feature.

@JettStiles - You DO realize that Steam is every bit as closed as Oculus Home is, right? 

The only way the Steam platform could even come close to being "open" is if you exclusively buy games that have offline-only modes and you keep 100% of your library installed at all times.   Otherwise, anything you can't play offline or that you don't already have installed is going to be lost the moment you lose access to your steam account.

And sure, Valve make a big fuss about "supporting the Rift on Steam while Oculus is being a nasty old closed garden"  but that support has been half-assed at best;  a lot of games straight up will not work on the Rift for a lot of people (including the SteamVR interface itself) and many more are buggy, and too much of a hassle to quit and re-launch from the desktop every time they crash.

Valve doesn't actually care about supporting Rift users at all, they just wanted to make themselves look good in the eyes of ignorant people who don't understand the business model of digital distributors.  Specifically, people who can't tell a Dollar Store from a prestigious Name-Brand Retailer, and expect them to operate exactly the same.

CrashFu said:

@JettStiles - You DO realize that Steam is every bit as closed as Oculus Home is, right? 

Maybe I wasn't clear about my definition of "open". In order for Oculus Home to run you need to have a Rift (yes, I know there are methods to get a Vive working with it but out of the box OH requires certain hardware..aka the Rift...to run) whereas for Steam you just need a PC and can create an account.

Lets assume for a minute I own a Vive (honestly I don't) and I want to play Dead&Buried (which I do). At this moment there is no legal way for me to achieve this.

Steam is far from perfect --- the VR part even less (and I'm not just talking about buggy setup-procedures) but as a common denominator it atm does a better job than Oculus Home.

(OC if my info is outdated and there is a legal way to install and use OH as a Viveuser then please disregard this post as utter bullshit)

All Hail Oculus :-)

I think the Revive application bypasses the need to have a Rift to run Oculus Home @JettStiles

So you are correct if we are only talking about Steam vs Oculus Home; but that 3rd party App (Revive) bridges the gap.

And meanwhile there's no third-party app that I know of that makes SteamVR or half the VR apps hosted on Steam actually work reliably for all Rift users..

The way I see it.. Using Revive with Oculus Home is like having a computer cable that doesn't fit into any of your computer's ports, BUT you also have an adapter that makes it work just fine... but trying to use SteamVR on a Rift is like having a dusty old dog-chewed computer cable you pulled out of a vomit-and-spiderwebs encrusted box, that is supposed to be compatible with your PC's ports but the pins are all bent and half-corroded..

Barring which headset is on the other end of each cable, I know which one I'd rather be using.